In a recent interview, Alex Karp said that his company Palantir was “the most important software company in America and therefore in the world”. He may well be right. To some, Palantir is also the scariest company in the world, what with its involvement in the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda. The potential end point of Palantir’s tech is an all-powerful government system amalgamating citizens’ tax records, biometric data and other personal information – the ultimate state surveillance tool. No wonder Palantir has been likened to George Orwell’s Big Brother, or Skynet from the Terminator movies.
Does this make Karp the scariest CEO in the world? There is some competition from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel. But 58-year-old Karp could give them all a run for their money in terms of influence, self-belief, ambition and – even in this gallery of oddballs – sheer eccentricity. In his increasingly frequent media appearances, Karp is a striking presence, with his cloud of unkempt grey hair, his 1.25x speed diction, and his mix of combative conviction and almost childish mannerisms. On CNBC’s Squawk Box, he shook both fists simultaneously as he railed against short sellers betting against Palantir, whose share price has climbed nearly 600% in the past year: “It’s super triggering,” he complained. “Why do they have to go after us?”
Leaving aside for a moment questions about what Palantir actually does, the company seems to be at the heart of many of the world’s pressing issues. In the US alone, its AI-powered data-analysis technology is fuelling the deportations being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Pentagon’s unmanned drone programme, police departments’ (allegedly racist) profiling of potential criminals and much more besides. Its software is being used by the Israel Defense Forces in its assaults on Gaza, by the Ukrainians against Russia and by police forces and corporations throughout the western world. In the UK, Palantir is at the heart of Labour’s plans to “modernise” the armed forces and the NHS: when Keir Starmer visited Washington in February, his first stop after the White House was Palantir’s office, where Karp showed him its latest military kit.
For the past few decades, Karp has stayed largely under the radar, but a new biography, The Philosopher in the Valley, reveals him to be a complex, thoughtful, often contradictory personality, with a background that explains many of his insecurities. “Fear is something that really drives him,” says the journalist Michael Steinberger, the book’s author. “One of the many fascinating things about Palantir is the way that it is the embodiment, in a lot of ways, of Karp … he created Palantir to make the world safer for himself, or for people like him.” Whether that remains the case is up for debate.
View image in fullscreen Fitness obsessed … Karp has been known to lead tai chi classes for employees
Steinberger’s book reveals Karp to be an idiosyncratic CEO with a singular lifestyle. He is obsessed with fitness, especially tai chi (he has been known to lead classes for employees) and cross-country skiing (he often wears ski gear day-to-day) and has a coterie of super-fit, mostly Norwegian bodyguards. Karp, who was paid $6.8bn in 2024, owns an estimated 20 homes around the world, many of which are apparently sparsely furnished ski huts. He is not married and has no children but has been described as “geographically monogamous” – he has two concurrent female partners in different parts of the world. He claims to run Palantir like “an artists’ colony” but he also likes to joke around in the workplace, comparing himself to Larry David, and once, according to Steinberger’s book, suggested that his own comic stylings “might be called Karp Your Enthusiasm”.
This is not just tech-bro quirkiness for its own sake, says Steinberger. “In this case, it is legitimately him. He is himself. And that is what he’s always been.” Steinberger went to the same college as Karp (Haverford, a private college in Pennsylvania, though the two did not know each other). He has spent the last five years snatching interviews with Karp whenever the CEO could fit him into his busy schedule – including, on one occasion, during his midday roller-skiing workout. Steinberger had to cycle alongside him, holding out his Dictaphone.
Karp grew up very much feeling like an outsider, it seems. The son of a Jewish paediatrician father and an African American artist mother, he was raised in Philadelphia, in an erudite, relatively privileged, leftwing environment. In a 2023 interview he said: “I always thought if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.” As much as ethnicity, he considers his defining point of difference to be his dyslexia, which, he tells Steinberger, “fucked me but also gave me wings to fly”. He also has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (he claims the tai chi helps him to focus).
View image in fullscreen At the heart of Labour’s plans … Keir Starmer and Karp at the Palantir offices in Washington DC in February. Photograph: @10DowningStreet @PalantirTech
Karp and Thiel first met as students at Stanford law school, where they hit it off despite being ideological opposites. But, while Thiel went off to found PayPal (with Musk) and embark on a fruitful tech investment career, Karp went to do a PhD in neoclassical social theory in Frankfurt. As a Jew, Steinberger says, Karp “wanted to understand how Germany, a pillar of European civilisation, had descended into barbarism.” While so many tech titans have amassed a fortune then used it to promote their “philosophy”, Karp has effectively done it the other way round. When he reconnected with Thiel and joined Palantir Technologies in 2004, he couldn’t write a line of code but he did know something about “ontology” – how information is structured and organised. He was also, apparently, a persuasive personality; good at recruiting and motivating eccentric talents like himself.
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